Macomb County Chiropractor explains lower crossed syndrome

Macomb County Chiropractor explains lower crossed syndrome

I’m a Macomb County Chiropractor and clinical director for Total Health Systemsband I want to talk about something very important today and it’s something that we treat quite a lot here at all of our facilities. It’s called lower crossed syndrome and though it’s a real detailed description and name, the truth is it’s a pretty simple concept when we talk about crossed syndromes. Our physical therapists and chiropractors work on the body and one of the things that we look at are imbalances in musculature in the joints. With lower crossed syndrome, there’s certain muscles that become imbalanced and become very tight while there are other muscles that become weak and imbalanced.

With lower cross syndrome we’re talking about the lower half of the body so there’s certain muscle groups that become tight which are the lower back, the musculature lower back, which includes the erector spine and muscles, and the Quadratus lumborum muscles, hip flexors, the muscles in the front of our legs, which will include the rectus femoris and soleus muscles. With those muscles being tight, if you think about it, they kind of cross each other this way, and then we have a group of muscles that become weak as a part of that imbalance. The weak muscles would be our abdominal muscles and our glutes, so again a cross. We have a cross coming this way and this way, and they cross each other, which is why it’s called the cross syndrome. We have the glutes and the abs weak with the low back and hip flexors extremely tight.

So when we approach a problem like this at our facility, it’s important that we first address the tight muscle groups. That’s why our therapy department takes a passive to active care approach. The passive part of the care is, they’re doing deep tissue massage or stretching of an individual. What they’re trying to accomplish is to address those tight muscle groups, so deep tissue massage on the low back musculature. We do deep tissue work on the hip flexors on the front of the thighs to try to get those muscles to release.

Once we start to see t the improvement, that’s when we move from the passive portion of that care to active care. That’s why I’m a Macomb County Chiropractorstanding in here, to demonstrate how to correct some of the weak muscle groups, which are specifically the glutes and the abdominals. We’re going to focus on the glutes today, and what we’re going to talk about is a basic hip hinging movement. That term is thrown around quite a bit in athletic circles and it’s also thrown out quite a bit in rehab circles as well.

It’s an extremely important movement that we try to train our not only our athletes but also our patients. A hip hinge is actually just hinging at the hips, moving forward, moving back with the hips. Okay? A lot of people when they go to try to bend down and touch their toes, they don’t think about hinging at their hips to touch their toes. What they’re doing is bending down and touching their toes like this, with a rounded back. See the back is way rounded, and that puts a lot of stress on the joints instead of the musculature. If we can hinge at the hips and bend down to touch your toes, you can see I can still keep my back flat. So that’s what important, is we’re keeping the nice, nice flat back posture by moving the hips forward, and moving them back. That’s really what we try to train athletes and patients on, is proper movement of the hips and the hips hinging, because if we hinge back like this, what we’re doing as we move forward is, we’re contracting our glutes which is one of those weak muscles. So if we hinge our hips properly, we can start to train those gluts to contract properly.

That becomes an important part of the whole rehab process and an important part of gaining strength in our athletes. Different exercises can be used to hinge the hips, which I just demonstrated one. If we use a stiff legged dead lifting motion with a barbell or with dumbbells, we can push our hips back and forward; that’s also called a Romanian dead lift, It can be named either way. We can do good morning type of exercises with this same movement with the bar in back, hinging back, hinging forward. Deadlifts and squats also include this type of hip-hinging motion, if it’s done properly. In a future segment, we’ll actually talk a little bit about deadlifting and/or squatting and, and how the hip hinge is involved in that. I hope this was a little informative for you. My name again is Dr. Aaron Lundgaard, a Macomb County Chiropractor at Total Health Systems.

Macomb County Chiropractor explains lower crossed syndrome

If your looking for a Macomb County Chiropractor, or need more information on Lower Cross Syndrome or any other services, you can visit out website at www.totalhealthsystems.com.